Robert Emmet Meagher
in Moral injury
American classics scholar and theologian, Emeritus Professor of Humanities at Hampshire College (Amherst). Earlier teaching at Indiana University and Notre Dame, with visiting positions at Trinity College Dublin and Yale across a fifty-two-year career. Long second career in veterans' counselling alongside the academic work. Has authored translations of Greek tragedy (The Essential Euripides) and a substantial body of theological scholarship alongside the moral-injury / just-war work.
Stake§
Meagher writes from an openly Christian-pacifist position. The stake is theological-political: the argument that the Christian just-war tradition has functioned as the doctrinal cover under which combatants have been required to participate in moral-injury-producing situations, and that the contemporary clinical recognition of moral injury is incidentally evidence against the tradition's protective claims. The position is consonant with Stanley Hauerwas's long-standing pacifist Christian ethics; the foreword by Shay in Killing from the Inside Out acknowledges Meagher's position without endorsing the pacifist conclusion.
Meagher's Killing from the Inside Out: Moral Injury and Just War (Cascade Books, 2014) is the principal long-arc historical-theological treatment of the moral-injury construct and the most explicit critique of the just-war tradition from inside the moral-injury literature. The argument situates moral injury inside a two-millennia history of Christian authorisation of killing under specified conditions, and reads the contemporary clinical recognition of the construct as empirical refutation of the tradition's claim to be morally protective of combatants.
The book sits in the theological corner of the moral-injury field alongside Brock and Lettini and Kinghorn, with the difference that Meagher's argument is more polemical and more historical-systematic. Inside Christian ethics his position is contested by just-war defenders (Nigel Biggar, Daniel M. Bell) who read the book as theologically thin; the openly pacifist conclusion is part of the book's polemical force and part of why it has had the field reach it has.